A snap of my grandfather with his thumb in a bandage standing next to my father.

Dinu writes, `Those suits look so good and your father looks great there. Any tailors in your family? I wonder what the Germans made of them back in those days?'

And I reply, `No, all sailors before I came along. My grandfather always had his suits made in Saville Row since being stranded in London for the duration of the War, during which he ran the gauntlet of U-Boats across the Atlantic as the captain of one of the cargo ships that ran supplies between the US and England. My dad used a tailor in Buenos Aires, which is why I had a leather jacket hand made for me in the same city when I was there in 2001, shortly after he died. In fact, I carried this photo with me on that trip. That was the first time I understood the meaning of ghosts, having, in my mourning, such a strong sense of following in his footsteps that I swear I saw him boarding a bus and looking back at me through the window as I ran behind feeling foolish. On the return journey I stopped a while in Cuba, washed up there by the same wave of mourning as I tramped the same streets he had half a century before; a merchant seaman ploughing the waters between Europe, Havana, and the Southern Cone.'

`By the way, on this trip to Hamburg, shortly after the War, my dad bought his first Leica on the black market. It was with this camera and a Weston handheld meter that at the age of nine I took what was my first photograph: a picture of my grandfather in his eighties some four years before he died'.

Dinu tells me that being photographed again at Sheffield Railway Station, has allowed him the chance, after so many years, to revisit the memories of when he arrived there from Hong Kong, as a young child.

`Standing at the platform brought back a visual memory of my brother and sister, who had already emigrated to the U. K. a couple of years before I did. When I got off the train as a seven year-old I distinctly remember that they ran across the platform to greet me. They were full of excitement. Today, I think that image replayed itself in my memory.’

`The Priority for me was to imagine what I would salvage if my house suddenly burned down.’

`Why the hell would I throw it away?’
Dinu Li, Sheffield Railway Station,
13 January 2008

`I know very well that the first item I would have to save would be this quilt blanket. It’s a blanket that all my siblings have always complained about because it’s really old. I guess many people like to throw away old things and replace them with new things. This is particularly true of Chinese Culture. Every New Year, they want to have a big Spring clean and throw things away; a sort of ritual of regeneration. But I’m kind of a melancholic person. I like to hold onto things and not throw things away. Hence, my house looks like a tip, because I like to just keep everything. And, the thing I have always wanted to keep is this blanket that the rest of the family wants to throw away.`Why the blanket is so important is that, when we were quite poor, in Hong Kong, I just remember we kept the ends of fabric that was being used to make pyjamas. Basically, my parents worked in an underwear and pyjama factory in Hong Kong. There was a whole period when they were both making pyjamas. They took home all the unused end cuts and they became the patches making up this blanket. I remember we helped them stitch the blanket together. Why the hell would I throw it away?’

`A Photograph of My Mother as a Young Woman’, Dinu Li, Sheffield, 13 January 2008

`The photograph shows her with my second oldest brother. It’s a photograph of them in China. I did not use the photograph in my book [The Mother of All Journeys, 2007]. Something about it was almost too precious to share in a book.’`It’s a photograph of her in her twenties; very young. She is squatting on a path with my brother. The photograph is literally outside the main gate of her village. And the path leads you out of the village, towards the city’.

The Drawing of a Bird,
The Back of an Old Receipt,
and Two Porcelain Pandas,
Dinu Li, Sheffield Train Station,
13 January 2008

`A memento from when I was about 5. My mum had been shopping and bought some soy sauce and oyster sauce. When she came homeI asked her to draw a little chicken on the back of the receipt. This drawing has always been with me since then.’…………….`One day I was sulking. To stop me sulking my mum took me shopping. We went to a big store and I selected these two pandas.’

Departure
Dinu Li, Sheffield Railway Station
13 January 2008

How many footsteps have brought us here?

Native? Immigrant? Cosmopolitan? Expatriate?Dinu replies to my e-mail asking whether he considers himself a native, immigrant, cosmopolitan, or expatriate: `I don’t consider myself a native. I feel I am somewhere in-between an immigrant and a cosmopolitan - the former more so when I am in the UK, whilst the latter when I travel around making work.As for expat - this is something I’d like to claim. As I have got older, I am wondering why I am never called an expat, and only ever called an immigrant. This feels unwelcoming. The fact is, I have what I consider a nice house, I have a white girlfriend, I have nice trips all over the country and sometimes I like getting drunk in town. This is more or less the lifestyle I see other expats living, wherever in the world I see them.’

`I was born in Hong Kong. My parents are British, so I am technically from England although I have lived most of my life in Asia and I now live in China. I always feel very liberated by the fact that I have no one particular place that is called home. I guess my emotional feeling of home, of deep familiarity and association with a place would relate to Hong Kong. But I'm aware that I will never quite be accepted as belonging to Hong Kong, which is something I struggle with. People want to label you and say you're from England, but that never sits quite right with who I am. To be honest, it is a liberation.'

`Why would I want to commit to just one place?’, Caroline Watson, Leek, Staffordshire, England, 9 February 2008

`I suppose I come nearest to being a cosmopolitan. I very consciously try to define myself as global. I've travelled extensively throughout my whole life. I have a passion for languages. I just adore travel, new experiences, having adventures. That, to me, is far more my lifeblood than a commitment to one particular place. I think the world is so rich. It's amazing. It's absolutely beautiful. Why would I want to commit to just one place?'

`Why have I chosen no objects? For me, what's really important is a spiritual identity rather than being attached to particular objects or places. It's very important for me to be liberated from material possessions, non-attached.'

`If this is the founding stone of London and my identity is so wrapped up with being a Londoner, how do I position myself, my stories, and my journey in relation to it?'

`There is a myth that states that London Stone’s safety is linked to that of the city itself: “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish”.’`While thinking about the multiple identities I have come to adopt, I was curious to learn about the London Stone. All historical stories are imbued with an aura of myth; so is this one. But, the power of what it can represent remains. The idea of a mark that represents the core of London, a point from which all distances in Britain might be measured, was attractive. I wanted to measure the distance from this core to all the stories that have etched themselves into me.’

A Momentary Thought Shared between Margareta Kern and John Perivolaris, Londoners,
London Stone,
Cannon Street,
22 April 2008

When John handed the suitcase to me, the thought I had was not that I was taking it from him, but that it was taking me somewhere. Walking towards the station, I noticed how so many people looked at it as I walked by. The suitcase seemed to have a life force of its own, an ability to attract attention. In the sunlight, its colours ranged from the lightest gold to a burnished copper. I stood for a moment on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street and looked at it. More than anything else, more even than our memories, material objects speak to us of the irrevocability of time. You cannot find a suitcase like this any more, I thought. Where these days would one find a suitcase made of wood and leather? With initials engraved?

Now they make them flimsy, disposable, entirely anonymous, even hard to distinguish, ready to be thrown into the hold of a plane and then out onto the baggage rack. And so, too, has the nature of journeys changed. We seldom say farewell anymore to loved ones. Or embark on voyages. We expect to arrive anywhere in the world in less than a day and to text home to say we’ve landed, to stay in touch via the mobile phone and internet. I watched a strange incongruence unfold before my eyes as I sat in the tube — the stillness of the case against the jarring sounds coming from my neighbour’s iPod. The suitcase revealed the newness and the raucousness of the contemporary. The three Japanese ladies sitting across me looked at the case, then at me and smiled. I knew the reason why they smiled was not because I had a suitcase with me, but because I had this suitcase. This suitcase, that spoke of another time — indeed, another sense of time and another sense of place.

The suitcase is here in my study now, where it will remain for the duration of its stay. Mark took a photo of me as I came home with it. My plan is to find objects to put into it. Objects that will somehow be meaningful and symbolic. However, as I begin to think of what these might be, I ask myself also what I shall find inside this case. Pandora’s box, maybe, or, perhaps, a treasure chest?

In the morning light, the marks on the suitcase looked at first like scars. Some were deeper than others; there was one like a bruise that had scratched the surface, others no more than faint lines that petered off. Then it occurred to me that indeed perhaps they were not scars, but traces. The casual imprints of collisions, happy encounters, rough resting places, the rubbing of shoulders between strangers. . . Like the traveller who comes home, the suitcase has many stories to tell. And like the traveller from afar, the suitcase is mysterious, impossible to know. All I could read at first were the letters J.D.P. My thoughts went to John’s grandfather, Captain John Perivolaris. My sole reference points for him were the words and photograph on John’s blog and of course, this suitcase. I tried to imagine the suitcase in a cabin on a ship. Might there have been a porthole in the cabin? An endless, shifting seascape outside? Had I ever known any sea captains? Ports? Or ships and anchors? I remember my mother once telling me that when she was young, she had spoken to a man who had travelled widely on ships. She was still in India then. He spoke of faraway places, of having been in Las Palmas, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Singapore, Aden. At the time, my mother had yet to travel much, though she wanted to. The names seemed glamorous. Exotic and faraway. So she had looked at the globe to find these names, but it was hard to tell what the places were like or how far away they really were from home. Later, she found herself visiting nearly all those places and each time, she would retell the story of that man and of how he had ignited in her the desire to see the world.

I remember too the port of Ceuta back in the 1970s, a small Spanish town on the northern coast of Africa that I used to visit as a child. The main street would fill for a day or two with sailors whenever a ship came in to port. This happened often, at least twice or thrice a week. They would fill the bars, speak foreign languages, laugh, drink and buy things and then, of course, disappear forever. They came from all over: Turkey, Italy, Greece and further afield… India, Japan. Strangers who came and went with the sea breeze.

That old, forgotten memory made me realize the suitcase itself was a sort of port, a solid rectangular object that stayed the same whatever the tide. Perhaps it was so for Captain Perivolaris, as it accompanied him throughout the voyages of his life. Now it was here moving from hand to hand and we were the sailors, the travellers who visited it and stayed for just a little while. The suitcase is resolute. It remains unchanging regardless of what we put in it or take out from it. My thoughts turn from John’s grandfather to others I do not know but have become linked to, Margareta Kern, Caroline Watson, Dinu Li, and John by whose desk this suitcase had remained for some months. Somewhere, in some ineluctable form, their traces were also on this case. On its surface. Like me, they had held the handle. They too had opened the lid, looked inside, wondered where it had been, what thoughts it had triggered. They too had sought to inhabit it for a while, filled it with their memories and the haunting of what once was. By bringing the suitcase home, I have entered an invisible weave of strangers, all of us bound by the ephemeral, the fluxes of displacement that are uniquely ours, and ours alone. In so doing, I am encountering the odd familiarity of the stranger. I know nothing or very little about you, and yet when looking inside this case, I feel your presence here in my midst… As I pour my memories into this case, I watch them swirl and mix with yours. I had not expected this… This unexpected connection with those I do not know.

[The photograph above has also been used by Fiona Bessey Bushnell in her post on the Case for Hope project.]

ID Issued to the Photographer's Father by the Panamanian Consulate,
Montreal, Canada, 1957 `Lost and Found' (3), Parvati Nair, June 2008

Dear Margareta,

Its odd to think that our paths are crossing in and around a suitcase. To sift through the sheets of text you left behind in the case is quite a different experience from seeing images of them on John's blog. On the screen, the words are loose, their meanings hard to discern. In my hands, they come to life in a cryptic kaleidoscope of meanings. I've being trying to shuffle the sheets and put the words in order so as to build the narrative of what you left behind. But, of course, the stories defy me. Sometimes you break into a language I don't know, that must be yours, and mostly you keep me searching.

In strange, unseizable flashes, though, the meanings and references of what you indicate explode before me. All those words around airports and immigration I've known them all my life. So many flights, so many landings, so many departures and so many arrivals, so many tense, interminable pauses at immigration. While the officer looks closely at you and the papers you present. As if they must surely be fake. The colour of you skin, your hair and eyes all tell him so there are about a billion of you all wanting to come here from one country alone, arent there? And so he or she asks why you wish to live in the UK or how it is that you got your right of residence or how long you plan to stay or why you have not applied for naturalisation as yet. As if everyone who wishes to live in the UK would have naturalised themselves by now! But for a split second your fears turn wild and you begin to doubt the authenticity of your own documents. Like when the sniffer dogs come round and graze your shin or when they ask you to wait on the side, seated on a sofa, or worse still, take you off to a separate room, one with glass walls that appear as mirrors on the outside, so no one can know that you are inside, and then take your passport and go off without saying why. Then... that moment of relief when the stamp comes down and he or she gestures asking you to move on. I have arrived! It’s only then that you dare text home to say you’ve landed. But still you wonder about those three Tamil guys you sat next to in that strange room and what happened to them.

So many other thoughts come tumbling out too. I recall that other man I once met on a border, who had no papers and got stopped. Who then lived for two and a half years in a makeshift camp for people like him. The illicit ones. The conversation with him was so predictable. Without papers. I want a better life. Stateless. Nowhere to go. What next? The same old story over and again. What else could we have talked about? He asked me to help him and I could not. Sister, do something, please help me if you can. I want to work. Make a good life. I could not. I could not help. You see, I didn’t bring myself to tell him. We were on two different sides of the border. Legal versus illegal. Who said when you went back to see him in a desperate bid to ease your conscience, ‘They give us food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. But still I’m hungry. I’m always very hungry. I feel I haven’t eaten for two years because my food is rice. Here they give me only bread.’

At first, what rises up from this suitcase are memories... Memories that are my own, memories gleaned from others. Whoever said that everything we recall is based on our own lived experiences? Memories can be borrowed, stolen, acquired, gifted. Memories are even imagined. Turned into words. Stories we weave to cover the gaps of oblivion. Knitted stories. Crocheted stories. Darned stories. Memories stitched and held together by words ... by images. Images and words.

When I first read John’s blog on Left Luggage and when I saw the photograph of a ship on high seas and of you, Dinu Li, in a train station with suitcase in hand, my mind leapt to a hidden memory, one that I had never really thought much about or ever consciously recalled. It was about two Revrobes, as they were called, or large suitcases, both in a leather somewhat more tanned than this ones, my fathers initials engraved in gold: VMMN. They have in fact been part of my life ever since I can remember. I seem to recall that I always knew the cases were special. My father put his belongings in them. The rest of us did not. Whenever we were about to leave a country, he would open them and begin to pack. With great care, I see him now, here in my minds eye, bending over and carefully laying his best suits in them. It was a sort of ritual. The Revrobes. They were his. They were special. In 1939, when as a boy of nineteen, he had gone from India to Britain to study, his parents had purchased these cases for him to take in them the things that he would need for his long stay abroad. Warm clothes, of a kind not needed at home, a formal suit, and books a copy of the Oxford English dictionary that he had won as a prize, his prayer books, his History textbooks, his beloved tennis whites. And so I remember my father, though I was not there to see him then, travelling with these two identical cases by train from Madras to Bombay, embarking on a ship that would take him to England, leaving India for the first time even as England entered the War. In a sense, though, going to England was also a sort of landing, for my father was born a British subject. This was the much-anticipated journey to the land of the ruler, who had long taught him and those of his generation to read Wordsworth and dream of England from the distant edges of the tropics. Indeed, such were the inner displacements not untypical of colonisation that perhaps there was more that was familiar in England for my father in his own literary imagination than there was in his native India. Indeed, I know for sure that the spires of Oxford and the lights of Piccadilly were in my father’s store of remembered images before he ever saw them. For colonial incursions are all too often displayed most keenly in the mind.

When my father returned four years later, the cases came back with him. Shortly after he began a life of travel. The cases went with him everywhere. From Madras… In cabins and holds, in the boots of cars, on luggage racks in trains… To Oxford and then to Cambridge, to London, to Bihar, to Delhi, to Cairo, to Colombo, to Delhi, to Kuala Lumpur, to Singapore, to Phnom Penh, to Oslo, to Delhi, to Warsaw, to Rabat, to Tunis, to Madrid, to London, to Delhi again…

There are no photographs of my father taking the train from Madras to Bombay, or of his mother and sisters waving goodbye from the platform… None of him embarking on his own for England from the port of Bombay. None, that is, except the ones I carry in my head, imagined from the shards of knowledge that I have of his life before mine. I see him clearly though, aged nineteen, a boy rather than the man I know, excited and also fearful at the prospect of the unknown. I see him, leather cases in hand, on the threshold of his life. About to embark.

When you come to think of it, the world is full of boxes. Boxes that overlap, collide, fit into one another and contain yet more boxes inside. Boxes that release boxes. The image of the suitcase on the blog also brought thoughts of another suitcase to me. One that was less domestic or immediate, but important nonetheless, that I had read about in recent weeks. Capa’s lost suitcase [http://tinyurl.com/5tgu7b]. Filled with unseen images of the Spanish Civil War. Images that Capa himself believed to have been lost. A lost suitcase when found contains not possessions, but a cache. Findings. Treasure. The invaluable. And indeed, Capa’s images of the Spanish Civil War are rightly invaluable. Think of Capa fleeing war-torn Paris for the safety of America, abandoning the contents of his dark room yet another box. Think too of the rolls of film transported from Paris in flimsy cardboard cases, boxes too, to Marseille, and from there, in the unlikely hands of a Mexican general, to Mexico City and now, in a final journey, to New York, to that vast repository of images, yes, another box that is the International Center of Photography.

Boxes shadow people. Even when put away, lost or left behind, they accompany them. Boxes remind us of our own mortality. Of journeys in life and death. In this case, though, the box has come back to life, a reminder that a box, if closed, can always be reopened.

Why is this find of Capa’s images in a suitcase so meaningful? Not merely because they were Capa’s but also because, in the box-like frame of each unearthed image, lie buried memories of Republican Spain. And so it is that this suitcase here leads me to think of Capa’s suitcase and so marks a small gesture of unearthing, of emergence, of shedding light on what has lain invisible and silent for so long. I hear once again the voices of those I knew in Madrid back in the 1970s, when the dictatorship was on its last, shaky legs, Paco, Toñín, Pepe Luis, Cristina, so many others. Who, in broken snippets, told me in whispers that they had been panaderos, albañiles, enfermeras, and then had found themselves becoming Republicans until the war ended. After that, they said, they had been nothing at all, people without memories, without a past. We were lucky to be alive. The neighbour next door would have told on us if he had found out. `No me preguntes. Es mejor no recordar.’ Don’t ask so many questions. I prefer not to remember. It had been the only way to carry on and get by. I think of them whenever I look at Capa’s images. These people I have known. They most probably are no longer alive. So, if the finding of Capa’s images is singularly important for me, it is because it honours them. No, it does not just honour them … it vindicates them. It vindicates who they once were. What they might have been and what they stood for. It validates a dream. When I think of Capa’s work, the image I find most striking is not that famous one of a falling soldier. It is one of a group of Republican women washing clothes in a thin stream of water. Engaged in the act of survival. Like these people I knew, old men in my barrio, who used to sit for hours on chairs out on the pavement in the evenings or who lived their weeks, yes, week after week, in the hope of winning the football pools. Old men in berets who had been gardeners, porters, doormen and messengers, old women who went shopping in the Mercado every morning to buy fresh fish and who walked around with curlers in their hair, these old men and women who had lived in silence and in forgetting for 36 long years. To think of Capa’s rescued images is to remember them.

I am shocked. I have got it wrong. Yesterday I rang my father in Delhi to ask him about his Revrobes. He was surprised.

`Why on earth are you thinking about that?' he asked.

`Because,' I replied, `I was thinking about the time when you left Madras to go to England and ...'

`What do you mean?' he cut in. 'I didn't have those cases then!'

I was silent for minute.

' You didn't?'

'No,' he said, 'you're mixing things up. I bought those Revrobes in Singapore. Long after my stay in England. As late as 1956.'

'Then ... ,' I was lost for words, 'why did I think all along that those were the suitcases you took to England?'

He laughed. 'My dear, you were probably too young. Well ... actually, come to think of it, you weren't born as yet. I used to have a beautiful large trunk, a cabin trunk as they called it those days that my parents gave me to take to England. I had it with me on the ship and then I brought it back and travelled with it to Cairo and other places. Then it fell apart and I couldn't get it fixed. So, when we were in Singapore, I got the two Revrobes instead. I had my initials put on them because the cabin trunk also had my initials engraved on it.'

I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to tell him that he had just shown me that the memories I held most true might well be fictions.'Hello!' he said. 'Are you still there ... ?'

'Yes ...' I tried to hide the sense of shock.

'What's the matter? Why are you, of all people, thinking about all this?'

'Just a bit taken aback. Thats all. I thought the Revrobes had always been with you.'

'Well,' he replied, 'they're very sturdy. Still in good shape, actually. I could still use them if I wanted to. Though I have to say they need a good clean. They've been up in the loft for so long. I was very sad, though, to have to give up my old cabin trunk. I was very fond of it.'

'So what did you do with it? Did you throw it away?'

'No,' he replied. 'We made one more trip with it back to your grandparents home in Madras and then we left it there, I think.’ His voice trailed off a bit. ‘Now I don’t know what’s happened it …’ He paused for a moment. ‘Who knows, maybe somebody has it and is making use of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I hesitated to carry on, lest it bring sad memories to him. ‘The house was… sold, wasn’t it? What happened to the things inside?’

‘You know how it is,’ he replied, ‘Here, in India. people don’t just throw things away. There are too many people needing things. Someone must have found it. That’s what usually happens. People come looking for things, when they know a house is about to be sold. They take what they can find. Then they recycle them and somehow use them again.’

Surely suitcases are not merely about departures or memories? For they are also about arrivals! Suitcases are about landing ... Greeting. Unpacking. They bring with them the newness of visitation.

To remember my father at the age of nineteen, to recall him leaving home, is also to think in the same breath of the other nineteen year old, my son, his grandson. Even as it imagines the past, my mind also reaches out to the future. Whoever said that time is linear must have got it wrong. If time does move forward, as they claim, then it surely does so in spirals. For I see Jamie, my son, now unwittingly seek out his grandfathers footsteps as he goes off to university. The same university, even the same college. Both aged nineteen. Nearly seventy years apart. My son is getting set to go where his grandfather has already been. Memory leaps forward now, transposing itself on what is yet to come. I always knew that memories can fill the present, but I realize now that they can also map the future. The suitcase confounds the linearity of time. There is no break with the past. The past is right here, in the midst of the present. It defines the present and is inextricable from it. Like grandfather, like grandson. Like my son and my father or like J.D.P., grandfather and grandson

This suitcase that is here, in visitation, unfolds to me the wondrous loops of memory and time.

The suitcase, I realise, has served as a sort of album. It has revealed memories that I can visualize. Few objects that we inherit are as eloquent as the family album. Inevitably, the album is nostalgic, though one never really knows what it is that this nostalgia stems from. As we look at images of grandparents, uncles and aunts or even our parents in their youth, on their wedding day, in a studio, at a picnic, all before our time, we never know really where to place them. These people, who are so familiar to us, seem strangers here. Their world seems removed from ours. Their clothes are different, their demeanour, even their gaze. Different and somehow unknowable. We feel a sense of loss for what we missed out on, a time before ours when we did not exist and they did. We realise too that we are barred by the irrevocability of time from accessing their pasts. Or from ever touching the core of their lives before our time. The album marks an impossibility of return.

Having lived mostly in Europe and North Africa, I remember the family albums that we had at home and took with us everywhere my fathers ancestral village in northern Kerala, my mother aged 12 wearing a skirt and seated near the rose bush in her parents garden in Trivandrum. Some of my older cousin who had been raised by my grandmother

But none of her. For she refused to be photographed after losing a beloved son too soon, and after that always claimed she was metaphorically dead too. Unable to be photographed. And so my grandmother continued to live for many years more, but in our photographic memories she and my uncle remain the ages they were when he passed away. What these images from before my time tell me is so different from what I can read into the images that were taken in my time, when I was present enough to know the context and the people. I recall the black and white photographs of my fathers grand-aunts, taken perhaps in the late 1920s or early1930s, great-grand-aunts of mine I never met, who lived all their lives on the Malabar coast … They had very long earlobes, stretched beyond belief in accordance with traditional ideas of feminine beauty and wore only a white cloth draped over their shoulders and around their lower bodies. I would look at their images when I was a child with no sense of recognition as such. I just accepted that this was how my ancestors used to be.

My mother told me that these ladies had perhaps only ever posed for one or two photographs taken in their entire lifetimes, no doubt under duress from the more modern members of the family, those who lived in cities and worked with the British and then came back for short breaks to the ancestral home. They had feared that the camera would steal away their spirit or bring bad luck. When I used to open the album and see their photographs, I would, at the age of four or five, find no way of relating to these ladies, of seeing them as relatives of mine. They were strangers … strangers who looked back unseeingly at me through the faded sepia of time.

Until, one day not so long ago, I suddenly realised that the family album is also a prime genealogical text. We trace our ‘roots’ through the images within and we imagine where we have come from. In a strange, unthinking way, we define ourselves through these others who are strangers but ancestors all the same. It’s probably all in the imagination, but we look at them in search of ourselves. It happened when I was at the library at SOAS, looking for a book by an Urdu novelist. I found myself suddenly before an old anthropological text – I wish now that I had taken the details down, but at the time I was too engrossed in what I found, too shaken almost, to remember to do so – on the Nairs of Travancore State. It had been written in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century by an Englishman, an anthropologist who had spent years measuring the cranial sizes of his subjects and labelling the different skin tones he encountered – wheaten, copper, bronzed copper, tarnished copper, burnt copper… Black hair and eyes, rounded faces, strong upper torsos. He described the habits of the Nairs, their matrilineal homesteads, in paddy fields, linked to other homesteads by tortuous paths, backwaters and rivers routes, and unusual marriage and kinship practices. He did so with a kind of measured rationality that sent a chill through my spine. He described their food habits, their religious caste-based practices, their social structures and language. The Nairs are a warrior caste, he said, with matriarchs at the heads of their extended households. His prose was clinical, as exact and encasing as possible. What shocked me was not what he said, but rather the fact that his detached and scientific tone was directed at the very symbols that denoted Kerala for me. Naadu … a single word to encompass land, homeland, home, origin. There were some photographs there too, of ladies like my great grand-aunts, bare-breasted, with long earlobes stretched over a lifetime, dressed in a white mundu and neriyal, their long hair coiled on one side of their heads. The photographs leapt out of the book and inserted themselves into the album that I realised I was still carrying around in my mind, superimposing themselves on the photographs of my great grand-aunts. They became one and the same. There was an absurdity about my reading this text. Me, dressed in jeans, earlobes unstretched, trying to find out about my imagined yet alien homeland from this old anthropological text from which my aunts seemed to be gesturing to me!

It is a nice name but was changed to Mandy, while my father was known as Jimmy and, in my case, Yiannis became John. It was the end of the 1950s and we were all making the effort to stir ourselves into the great North American Melting Pot.

Abrazos,

John

Dear John,

Yes, I can well imagine how names might be changed to suit one’s location — my own name gives me endless problems (Pavarotti, Poverty, Pavaaarti, Parbati in Spanish and Barfaati in Arabic, etc!). Things have gotten slightly better since the Harry Potter books came out, as I have a namesake there and more people say my name… though usually wrongly!

Un abrazo,

Parvati

'A Nair Lady' (1928)

From a set of watercolours by Rao Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar. Part of the personal collection of Professor Frances Pritchett (Columbia University). This and other watercolours from the set may be viewed at: http://tinyurl.com/6dcmgp

The understanding I have is that the old aunts dressed very much like this lady here.

You can see what I mean about the ears! The jewellery she is wearing (necklaces) is traditional and symbolic, indicating her status and wealth. Jewellery and body ornaments are a central aspect of Nair families and a subject of much discussion amongst the women (even now!!!). Unfortunately, Nairs were orginally invaders of the south and took ownership of lands — paddy fields, coconut groves, spice fields. Most have a spacious ‘tharavadu,’ or family home often set in the middle of the fields with a small shrine attached. Some of this changed abruptly in 1956, when communism was voted in to the great detriment of many wealthy Nair families! I recall that my grandmother had to dismiss her family goldsmith — a permanent member of the household — for safety’s sake. After that, he had to go and sell his services to shops and families on an ad hoc basis, something he had never done before. It was a very sad goodbye as the two families had been together for at least three generations, probably more. Later, when I was a child, he would come over and work inside the house (as opposed to having his own workplace on the grounds) when we visited and my grandmother wanted something special made for one of us grandchildren. In fact, come to think of it, Kerala was the first place on earth where communism was voted in! Suddenly people were naming their children ‘Lenin’ and calling each other ’sakhav’ or comrade. It didn’t last long. By the 1970s, mass emigration to the Gulf began and people happily embraced the capitalist way of life. Now they’re all off to the US and Canada as well.

[This portrait has been placed in the public domain by the Arumana Ammaveedu Family]

Regeneration, `Lost and Found’ (9), Parvati Nair, London, June 2008

There is, in fact, a man I remember with a suitcase. I met him on a train. On the Grand Trunk Express, to be precise, some twenty or more years ago — Grand Trunk Express? A coincidence of name? If you know about great railway journeys or have watched television programmes about them, then you might be aware of the Grand Trunk Express. It runs daily between New Delhi and Madras Central Station, or Chennai Central, as it is now known, stopping at 36 stations along the way. The journey famously takes 35 hours and 35 minutes, so that if you left New Delhi at about 8pm this evening, you would reach Madras early in the morning day after tomorrow. The journey is a magnificent one, crossing as you do the length of India, from the north to the south. Most maps don’t really tell you the truth about distances in India. Perhaps because Europe tends to lie at the centre of maps we get here, India seems marginal and small and all bunched up. So it is not till you get there that you realise how vast India really is. In a single journey, the GT Express, as everyone fondly calls it, covers 2186 kilometres, making it one of the longest train journeys in the subcontinent.

I shared a compartment with this man. He slept on the upper bunk opposite me, while I had the use of a lower one. Below him an elderly lady settled in and her son, who slept on the bunk above mine, was, she told me, accompanying her on a pilgrimage to South India. In an unspoken act of chivalry, the men, it seemed, had left the lower bunks to us ladies. For most of the 35 hours, the old lady chanted prayers, stopping only to eat or sleep. Sometimes, she sung them and other times she recited slokas in Sanskrit. Nobody seemed to mind. The blessings she sought might just come by our way too. Her voice melded with the landscape that went coursing by. By mid-morning the day after we left, the faded greens and dust of northern India were giving way to the denser colours of the tropics. The earth began to turn red as we headed south and the trees were thicker and darker green. At one point I fell asleep, only to be woken by a small hand patting my head. Startled, I jumped up. I turned and saw that the hand came in through the open window and belonged to a little child selling sliced mangoes. Sister, buy some, please, she was saying. We had stopped at yet another station. At every station the children crowded at the windows, trying to sell us fruit, matches, cigarettes, pens. The old lady’s son, a young man of thirty or so, kept busy going in and out of the compartment. He would get down at each station and stretch his legs. Once or twice he came in with four cups of very hot, very sweet tea, refusing to take money for the drinks. At mealtimes, when the waiters came by, we ate solemnly, with the knowledge that if we did not eat what we got, we would have to go hungry. As the train lurched along, the old lady smiled at me from time to time. Then she began to speak to me. The lady seemed concerned that I was travelling alone. She asked if I was married. When I said no, she appeared worried. Why not, she asked in a hush voice. Is there any problem? No, I said. Then why not, she insisted. I hesitated. I don’t know, maybe because I haven’t met the right person yet, I finally replied. She found that funny. Like a little girl, she burst into peels of laughter. ‘Child!’ she said, ‘that only happens in cinemas! In real life, God finds us a man and we live with him. So stop looking for the right man and do as God says.’ On the second night, the old lady’s son unpacked a small cassette player and played some music. Kabhie kabhi mere dil me khayal aatha hai … Every Indian, diasporic or desi, knows the song. The old lady sang along. So did her son. The sounds of the flute and the shehnai floated out over the passing fields and villages, song clouds that brought rain with them. Once we had crossed Maharashtra, the rains met us. The monsoon moves northward in India, hitting the south first of all.

Only the man on the bunk above the old lady did not speak at all. He sat up throughout the trip, a suitcase by his side. It was a small brown one, with an old-fashioned padlock on it. He even slept sitting up, a pillow propped up behind his head, the blanket thrown over his huddled knees. The first morning, he removed a key from the inner pocket of his waistcoat and carefully unlocked the suitcase. I was amazed. Inside were sunglasses with an assortment of frames, all in bright colours – light pink, deep pink, indigo, navy blue, lime green, yellow, black, silver, gold and many, many more. There might have been a hundred or more pairs of sunglasses in there. Every now and then the man would remove the pair that he was wearing, put it back in the suitcase and then take out another one and put it on. The garish colours of the frames contrasted with his sombre dress – a grey cotton kurta salwar with a respectable waistcoat on top. In thirty-five hours, he must have done this at least thirty-five times. Maybe more. Below him, the old lady carried blithely on with her prayers, unable to see what he was doing, while I watched them both from my bunk facing them. Of course, I could never really tell where he was looking, as his eyes were always covered by the dark lenses.

We reached Madras Central at about 6am. The Grand Trunk Express has some 25 coaches, all of which are usually so very full that people have even perched perilously on top of the train throughout the journey to hitch a free ride. The crowd was thick and chaotic as we stepped off the train. Everyone seemed to be talking at the same time. I turned to say good-bye to the old lady and her son. ‘May you live long, my child,’ she said. She patted my cheek fondly with her right hand.

The man with the suitcase stepped out behind me and walked past us. He did not look at us or say good-bye. He seemed eager to get going. A porter went running up to him and took the case from him. The porter wore a coiled cloth on his head. Dexterously, he hoisted the suitcase up onto the top of his head and walked quickly behind the man down the length of the platform. I watched them go, until they finally disappeared in the milling crowd.

In holding this suitcase in my hand, that scene from so long ago surfaces unexpectedly. Of what use are memories?

While travel is really what I suppose my life experience has, in essence, been about, homeland has been a kind of constant preoccupation.

My parents are Indian. I was born in Oslo. I later realised that I was conceived in Cambodia, in Phnom Penh. My father was a diplomat and, in theory, we moved every three years, depending on his postings. You never knew where you were going.

For my parents, home was very clearly India. Not just India. As you know, Indians are very regionally oriented. My family is from the southern tip, from Kerala. There's a very strong sense of cultural identity. So, their sense of home was very strong.

Barely avoiding the war, while they were expecting me they travelled from Phnom Penh to Laos, I believe; and, from there, to Bangkok. From Bangkok to India. From India they came to London. And, from Newcastle, they took a ship to Norway. By the time I came here to study at university, I had lived in seven countries, and only in India for a short while. A person like me doesn't really have a sense of national identity. I have always found it very curious that people would be willing to kill themselves for their nation. Nationalism seems odd to me. I agree with Benedict Anderson, that it is a constructed idea.

Because I grew up in an embassy I was surrounded by emblems of the nation. The crest of India was everywhere. That ancient, deep-rooted sense of Indianness that all Indians are supposed to feel, always felt false to me. I was never quite sure what was there behind it all. But, then again, the reality of being Indian hit me when I started crossing borders and frontiers after I got my Indian passport.

Strangely enough, though I have been eligible for a U.K. passport since the age of 21 I resisted applying for one. My Indian passport is one part of my Indianness I have wanted to cling to. I only gave it up two years ago, when India acknowledged its huge diasporic population. The government introduced a new system whereby you could be an Overseas Indian Citizen, which I am now.

In addition to my Overseas Indian passport, I brought a map because it was the one thing we always had at home. An essential item to locate where you might be going next. My father also used to own a globe, which sat on his desk. He still has one.

I also brought an orange, partly because the biggest chunk of my life has been spent in the Mediterranean, between Morocco, Tunisia, and Spain. That's probably the main reason for my being a Hispanist. I have a sense of affinity with the Mediterranean. Interestingly, whenever I've been to Greece or Italy I've felt out of place. Though there's a tangible similarity in colours and sense of place, they're somehow different. I suppose it's a question of personal identification. This is probably what lead Mark and me to buy a disused olive oil warehouse in a village south of Granada. The association of oranges and with the Mediterranean has been with me since childhood. Just before going to Morocco, we had lived in Poland during the Communist era. The contrast with the jewel-like colours of the South was particularly striking, especially the orange trees. Ever since then, I've loved citrus fruits and trees. In Poland, it was cabbage every day and you had to queue for hours to get fruit.

The last thing I brought was a photo frame. I collect photo frames and hoard them until I find the right photo. If I see a frame I like and it's affordable I put it to use or give it away. I like the idea of the photo frame that's not been filled yet.

On the fourth of October 2008, at 11 o’clock in the morning, I arranged a meeting in the centre of London with John D. Perivolaris (J.D.P.), grandson of the late captain of the Greek merchant navy with whom he shares a name and birthday. John is the current owner of the suitcase that I will keep for about a month and which bears the monogram of his grandfather: J.D.P. The encounter stretched back in time like an inventory since I hadn’t seen John for years. Our chat was followed by a visit to The Photographers’ Gallery to see the British artist Dryden Goodwin’s latest exhibition, entitled Cast. Accompanied by John, who is a professional photographer, I was in a privileged position as I stood before the images, noticing details of craftsmanship the untrained eye takes for granted. The suitcase also began its journey with us through the centre of London. We persevered in our vain attempt to locate an English translation of the work of the excellent Afghan poet Partaw Naderi, whom I had the opportunity of meeting thanks to the London poet and translator Sarah Maguire and the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS. Partaw Naderi was not in my thoughts today when I left home, but John Perivolaris mentioned him to me after seeing one of his poems in Tube, as part of the Poems on the Underground project (http://tinyurl.com/3ghran). Naderi was now a growing presence in mind, as we failed in our quest to find his poetry. This was hardly surprising, since it is often only through the intervention of a miracle that one can find poetry anywhere, at a time when the market seems convinced that it is only narrative that sells. Nevertheless, we already knew that it is impossible to buy what is not for sale, and there you have the proverbial dog chasing its own tail. So it was that two disappointed buyers of poetry left Foyles bookshop empty-handed. On the way home I remembered that poem entitled `The Mirror’, written in Kabul by Partaw Naderi in 1989:

I have spent a lifetime in the mirrors of exilebusy absorbing my reflectionListen — I come from the unending conflicts of wisdomI have grasped the meaning of nothingness

I had always wanted to make these lines my own, as I have spent most of my life in the mirrors of exile. Until now (a very important `until now’, since there are always turning points that lead us blindly into the unknown) I have lived in London more than anywhere else. In fact, Cuba, and Santa Clara in particular, the location of my childhood, has ended up being the place where I have spent the least time, and whose passport I have never possessed. Naderi leads me to think about that absorption of reflections that preoccupy our exile, an exile that takes a thousand forms, like a partially severed planarian, that family of flatworms whose segments regenerate however many ways they are cut. This is one of the metaphors I most frequently use to represent the lacerations that line our exit from the nation that anticipates our birth with a concept of itself as a people which, many times, as in my case, is inculcated in one by the very system in which they grow up. Yet, for me, nothingness is never emptiness. Rather, it is everything, as it was for one of my favourite poets, José Ángel Valente, to whom I dedicated several years of critical work as I prepared my first doctoral thesis, which focussed on his work. In my case, that sense of totality allows one to grasp the conflicts of so many communities in exile, diaspora, cushioned cosmopolitanism, and all those other terms that define us through absorption in the mirrors of all those nations through which we pass, as citizens, or in other, more temporary, guises.

Heading home with this suitcase which has already made so many international journeys, including to Cuba and Argentina, in the hands of John’s grandfather, father, Dimitri, I feel that I have been entrusted with an object of which I must take care. On a cloudy, overcast autumn day in London, my main worry was that I would be caught in a shower while I walked the last mile or so home through the surrounding wood. While I was completely lost in my thoughts, the suitcase had transformed itself into a metaphor of other things, of journeys I had taken or planned, of what I had never had and of what I have now. I should explain myself: my father was both an isleño (a Canarian from La Palma) and an aplatanado, in other words, he not only settled in Cuba but he had adopted that other island as his own country during the Franco period. Moreover, I believe that if he had arrived with any sort of suitcase he must have misplaced it around the time of the revolution (a much misused term) since there was no trace of such a thing at the time I was born. My childhood passed without suitcases nor journeys beyond the coastline of the island, over whose entire length I was certainly able to roam, without suitcases, but instead with whatever bags or holdalls were necessary within the limits of what was or wasn’t available. When I was five the first suitcase arrived thanks to Raúl Torre, a cigar maker who knew carpentry, who was a friend of my father. Raúl made up a wooden suitcase with strong enough fastenings so that everything could be stored securely for the 45 days my sister would spend away from home while attending camp for the first time. Later, I would inherit that same suitcase to attend two similar camps, firstly to work on the tobacco vegas in the centre of the island, near Baez, and then cutting sugarcane, in Jutiero. Meanwhile, my parents had had another wooden suitcase made for me, this time with a padlock, where I could keep my books, as I have always been fussy in this regard. That suitcase ended up storing the treasures of that time: a large illustrated book of verses by Alfonso Sastre, whom much later, as a researcher of theatre and censorship, I would rediscover in another context; booklets about the exploits of the heroes and martyrs of the country’s independence, and the subsequent political drama I now closely followed, more so than ever after a brush with politics caused by ignorance, since we avoided the subject at home so as not to put our foot in it. This had its disadvantages, like the time, at the beginning of the school year, when Belkis Caballero rounded on me in the middle of a lesson taught by my second-grade teacher, Olga, asking me if I was a worm or a communist. I demonstrated my great ignorance by saying quietly that, as I did not know what type of animal a communist was, I would therefore choose to be a worm, if only to choose something. The reaction was such that Belkis fed me to the lions, with the whole class seemingly in the know apart from me. The schoolmistress saved from a sticky situation, for which I am still grateful, and from that moment I resolved to stock up on political texts that would enable me to inform myself on what I had to be, on what was permitted. Consequently, that suitcase was transformed into a political source of unequivocal information. Less dramatically, the work of the naturalist Carlos de la Torre also found a place there, my father being a keen amateur naturalist himself. And, outside the confines of the suitcase, there was evidence around the house of his literary tastes: Galdós, with his National Episodes, and Blasco Ibáñez, among others, alongside the books of science y the grammatical sources of knowledge. The moment when Belkis posed her question to me marked key changes in the wider world. Days later, in 1973, began the political transformation of Chile, whose repercussions were so great in Cuba. Subsequently, after uncaging the birds at my cousins’ house, prompted as I was by the political imprisonment of another cousin since 1968, my motto would be `Free Luis Corvalán’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Corvalan). Indeed, the Soviet campaign for his release had been launched in Cuba, leading, in 1976, to his exchange with the Soviet political dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky). The suitcase was then transformed into an archive of historical materials relating to Leftist international politics (another useless metaphor, unless we are able to define the term every time we use it; nevertheless, on this occasion I believe it is comprehensible), which were the only publications that were available to me at the time.

This suitcase, belonging to J.D.P., previously to his father and grandfather, sailors both, and which even travelled to my country, has transported me back to childhood journeys, to the absence of traveling suitcases, and to the suitcase as a place where we keep some of our most valuable possessions when we undertake journey. Curiously, this suitcase also transports me to what was left behind when the moment of my departure arrived, in 1980. Leaving Mariel for Key West across the maritime bridge between the two, taking a suitcase with me was an impossibility. It was a moment in which the nation was divided between those of us who were leaving, `citizens’, and the `comrades’ who stayed behind. Many of those who left with me have now joined other `citizens’ of countless countries. The courses of their journeys have been diverse, because exile is not homogeneous nor are the lacerations suffered as part of the transcultural processes of emigration the same for everyone. Equally so with mass exoduses, as in my case, when more than 125,000 people leave by the same route, using the same means, by sea, after acts of repudiation (during eggs were thrown at us, at the price of ten for a peso, exempt from rationing restrictions). It was the farewell granted us by those who were staying behind, in return for the sin of dissent or for the betrayal of leaving the country, even though it is the individual stories that fill the gaps of history. My family and I left the island with only the clothes on our back and without papers, our identity cards having been confiscated. We had reached the point where we would have to start anew, without suitcases, but carrying a lifetime’s baggage inside.

The next time I needed a suitcase was in Miami, when I bought a luggage set by installments for a trip to the Middle East, as part of an exchange programme with Israel. The first Lebanese war, in 1982, along with my refugee status, put paid to my plans. I put those same suitcases to use for the first time in 1989, on a trip to Spain, a country my father was revisiting after 36 years. It is these and other images that I am revisiting as I set out with J.D.P.’s suitcase by my side.

I don’t know how to thank you for such a moving text apart from setting out to translate it. It seems to me that this will involve a perpetual return journey between the `over there’ of our autobiographical, or inherited, histories and the present. Between your text and its translation stretches a navigation chart between our fathers’, and my grandfather’s, Cuba and a London full of suitcases carried along by the human currents that intersect in its labyrinth.

`I am quite capable of travelling with nothing.’ Indeed, the only possessions Omar took with him when he left Cuba were the clothes on his back. He is accustomed to the experience of starting afresh on a blank page.

`When I came to London some 17 years ago, it was with one suitcase. That suitcase became my home, my apartment, my library. I still permit myself the luxury of carrying several books with me when I travel. My literary research takes me around the world. As I travel, my suitcase becomes a portable archive of the materials I collect along the way. It also becomes increasingly heavy.’

Omar picked up this stone candle holder in Miami. It represents the orisha Elegguá. In Afrocuban beliefs, this deity is the personification of fate, luck, and death. He holds the keys of destiny, opening and closing the doors of happiness and unhappiness. For Omar, Elegguá represents the twists of our multiple destinies. For my restlessly travelling friend, each destination is multiple, in proportion to the number of discoveries we make there.

Long Distance

My conversations with Omar lead me to e-mail the poet Partaw Naderi with an invitation to collaborate in this project. He graciously accepts. Since distance currently prevents our meeting in person, at least his words and my photographs can bridge the distance between us in this space.

“Is it pigskin? How old is it? That would be perfect as my bedside table...”

I had been warned that this might happen. Within the first five minutes of carrying the case two people had already made admiring remarks about it - and we still hadn't completed the short walk from the Cathedral to the coffee shop to complete the handover. As I left John, I deliberately took a shortcut through the backstreets of the Northern Quarter to Piccadilly train station: more for speed rather than any great desire to be inconspicuous. While I certainly gained time, the power of the case's appeal was ultimately beyond my control. Having quietly negotiated the journey with only the curious and furtive gazes of a few silent passers-by, it only remained for me to slip on to the train and find a seat. But as soon as I entered the carriage, I was halted in my tracks: the mere sight of the large suitcase in my right hand had clearly transfixed the waiting ticket inspector and she was beaming a smile of surprise and admiration. She immediately stopped me to query its provenance and age. The suitcase was working its magic already.

Even though empty - except for the eggshells the previous borrower had left within it - one of the first things that struck me about the case was its weight and sturdy construction. It was clearly built to last, and so it has. What a contrast it is to carry something of such emotional and personal value rather than wheel a bland plastic case with in-built obsolescence included as part of the price. I quickly realised that carrying such a large case by hand imposes a certain physical relationship on the traveller. Its bulk obliges you to adjust your gait in order to accommodate its size, and perhaps this also encourages an emotional attachment with it too. Sliding your fingers round the handle and feeling the worn leather clearly connect you in a rather direct way with those who have previously held it. How wonderful it must be still to have this in your family: to hold such a cherished object held by both your father and grandfather, and for so long.

The train pulls away from Piccadilly and begins the short distance south to my home in the suburbs. As the city centre slips behind me, I pick out landmarks of the city upon the horizon and recognise areas that I know well from my childhood. I was born in Manchester and grew up in its inner city during my early years until we moved just beyond the borders of South Manchester when I was five. Relatives of mine have lived in and around the city for decades and the train ride in and out of Manchester has always been a very familiar one to me. Looking at the case alongside me as the city centre begins to recede, I begin to think about the major role migrants have played in making Manchester what it is today. How many people have arrived here over the years and carried their own cases through the city? I begin to imagine my own father carrying one when he arrived here as a 17-year old - his first journey abroad from Ireland, arriving in a city and region that is still his home today. But somehow I doubt that he would have had such a large and well-made case when he arrived.

Why had I agreed to participate in the project? It was my own initiative and something I had been contemplating for some time. The timing also seemed apposite: a week later I was due to travel to France for a week before spending eight days in Algeria, and later in the summer I was to go on family holidays in Italy and Ireland in August. This itinerary sounded less than relaxing but at least I would not have to worry about the plight of the case: its value far too great to risk the foibles of Parisian baggage handlers, we agreed to leave it safely at home. So it would travel with me mentally as I prepared to begin my journey, and a few Polaroids I took of it and placed within my own luggage provided a reminder as I travelled around France and later across the Mediterranean.'

When we met to discuss my travels over the next few months, I had mentioned to John that I had only just managed to secure in time my visa for entry into Algeria before leaving first for Paris. John suggested I take a photograph of it for inclusion in Left Luggage.

Getting the visa proved a minor ordeal in itself. Without the time to deliver my application by hand at the London embassy and collect it in person the following week, I had sent the relevant forms and documents by post a month earlier. When nothing had materialised with ten days to go, nerves got the better of me. I reluctantly began ringing the phone number for visa applicants but to no avail: never quite able to reach a member of staff, either a recorded message would instruct me to call back later or instead I would be placed in a telephonic limbo – trapped in a system that had lost track of my call and couldn’t cope with the volume of callers. But perseverance eventually paid off. After ringing sporadically over three consecutive days, to my great surprise and relief I finally got through, and was assured by a very courteous member of staff that the visa would arrive in time. It was duly delivered the following day.

Although I have previously travelled a fair amount abroad, this has mostly been within Europe, and when I have left the continent it has been to countries – such as the U. S. and Morocco – where British citizens are usually given a visa waiver. Having to wait on tenterhooks for a visa therefore remains a rather novel experience for me, and provided a timely reminder that British citizens don’t necessarily have open access beyond all nation-state borders. But how stressful really was the wait? I had no reason to doubt that I would be granted my visa eventually, but simply feared that it had either never been received or had been sent already and lost in the post. If anything, I had been given a momentary and minute glimpse into the realities of life for citizens whose access is far more restricted and for whom international travel is seldom a foregone conclusion.

This made me wonder whether most British citizens don’t ultimately take for granted their relative freedom of movement abroad. The mere procedure of having to make a visa application well in advance of travel – although this time mercifully simple for me – made me think how straightforward even this is if you have the right passport. This contrasts sharply with the tales I heard last time I visited Algiers, when I couldn’t help but be moved when listening to people speak of their ordeals of rejected visa applications, interminable queues outside the French embassy for a tourist visa to visit family, the habitual refusals with which such requests are now met, and of the shameful and embarrassing questions even academics must answer when applying to do research in the U. K.. Perhaps it’s only by stepping outside the E. U. and looking from the outside in that you begin to grasp fully how closely its borders are policed and movement into it tightly restricted. It also serves as an acute reminder, were one needed, of how the convenient fictions of geographical borders and of the grand narratives of nation states can have very real consequences as soon as you wish to cross frontiers or travel elsewhere. But why – by accident of birth – should I be able to more or less come and go as I like, but not many of the people I meet?

If you look closely, beneath my visa you can just make out the word `Irlande’ and the symbol of a harp on the page. Although born and raised completely in the U. K., I finally acquired Irish citizenship when I turned thirty. This was not for any cynical reason – no `flag of convenience’ – but something I had often thought about in my twenties but never quite got around to doing.My father is from Donegal and my maternal grandparents hail from Roscommon: they too migrated across the Irish Sea when young and my mother was born and brought up in Manchester. As a result, I am British by birth, ethnically Irish, and have a vaguely Mancunian accent. Perhaps because of this, I’ve often thought how much can hinge on an accent: think of how frequently the allegiances of British and English sportsmen and women, born or brought up abroad, are questioned – especially if their accent sounds foreign. An accent can work as an enduring reminder of someone’s alterity.

I also think that, if you don’t have the requisite accent, you can feel that difference emotionally and almost physically as soon as you open your mouth: while you belong `visually’ - look the `part’ at least – your voice always gives you away. And, although as a linguist I clearly have some ability as a mimic, I’ve never been able to imitate an Irish accent successfully – and after years of hearing my father’s one I have never not been completely deaf to his. A vaguely Mancunian accent is therefore my lot and any supposedly unproblematic identification I might have with Irishness is for the meantime indefinitely disrupted. But would I ever feel completely one or the other anyway? I doubt it: sometimes nationality or citizenship seems to me to resemble a convenient fiction: almost like a film script you’re not compelled to follow, as long as you’re in the credits… Dual citizenship ultimately seems like the best compromise, and in some ways a luxury: it allows you to feel in-between but also permits you to remain both at the same time. On paper at least.

Visa to Algeria, Issued in Marseilles to the Photographer's Father,
Dimitri John Perivolaris, 27 December, 1948

Affaires Étrangères, From the Seaman's License of Dimitri John Perivolaris, 26 October, 1948

Photograph of a Ship, from the Personal Collection of Dimitri John Perivolaris, Undated

Postcard of Bône (Now Annaba), Brought back from Algeria by Joseph McGonagle, July 2009

Postcard of Bône (Now Annaba), Verso, Brought back from Algeria by Joseph McGonagle, July 2009

Postcard of Bône (Now Annaba), Brought back from Algeria by Joseph McGonagle, July 2009

Postcard of Bône (Now Annaba), Verso, Brought back from Algeria by Joseph McGonagle, July 2009

Hi John,

What beautiful images of your father’s travel documents and his own traces between France and Algeria. What a striking contrast this makes from my own experience of air travel between Paris and Algiers this summer. It’s a shame I didn’t manage to find an image of Bône from when your father’s passport, which you included in discussions with Parvati, was issued there in 1953 – just a year before the Algerian War began. Although I would have thought that the postcard I included that shows various supposed images of the city in large letters would certainly be contemporaneous – maybe late 1950s or early 1960s at a guess?

Perhaps the postcard of the gentleman by the lighthouse, postmarked as 1914, could hark back more to your paternal grandfather’s generation of seafarers. Did I tell you, by the way, that on my father’s birth certificate from 1950 his father’s occupation is listed as fisherman? Malin Head and the surrounding coast has historically been a significant fishing area, and it’s not for nothing of course that the region is still mentioned every day on the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast.

Both having men of the sea in the family is a link I hadn’t made before, but alas – save for this one word on that document – I have no traces of my own paternal family’s nautical travels.

All the best,

Joe

P.S. My wife reminds me that my father-in-law was an engineer in the merchant navy for nine years as a young man: Manchester may be landlocked but water seems to surround me.

A mere cursory glance at my passport photo by the police officer before I proceed to baggage reclaim in Paris: all no doubt that’s needed if you have a EU passport… and are white.

As I pulled my rather worse-for-wear wheelie case behind me to the airport train station, how could I not think fondly about the elegant suitcase John had lent me the week before? Arriving in such a temple of glass and steel, I’m sure the case would have stood out and attracted many an admiring glance. Alas, I couldn’t risk John’s wrath were it never to appear on the luggage carrousel from the hold or arrived slashed and prised open irreparably… Perhaps baggage handlers are the ones to blame for our current affinity with ugly plastic luggage.

After two days in Paris, the next step of my journey begins, and I catch a TGV train down to Aix-en-Provence to visit the French colonial overseas archives held there, before going on to Marseilles. Upon descending at Aix’s TGV station, you have to catch a short shuttle service In order to reach the city centre. A coach is handily waiting there for me when I arrive, but after sitting down I become slightly perturbed by the ridiculously oversized dome that houses a CCTV camera overhead. I get some sort of symbolic revenge by taking a snap of it on my phone and smugly feel a moral victor. But the camera is still there.

The South of France can feel very differently from the North, and although Paris is one of my favourite places and I am very fond of Northern France, I think I’ll always have a special connection with Southern France. At the age of eighteen, I spent six months teaching English in a small town called Sommières, between the cities of Montpellier and Nîmes, and I have returned to that region several times since. Marseilles lies to the East of there just along the Mediterranean coast and has always held a magnetic attraction for me. In many ways I couldn’t be further from home in France’s second city, but Marseilles’ perennial underdog status compared to rival Paris isn’t so dissimilar to the rivalry between Manchester and London. The rather crucial difference being that Marseilles has a beach.

During my stay I meet with the photographer Yves Jeanmougin (http://www.yvesjeanmougin.com/), whose book Marseille/Marseilles (1992) bore witness to the city’s famous ethnic diversity by including photos taken of its residents from a wide variety of ethnic origins throughout the 1980s. Some of Yves’s recent work on the life and memory of the French Algerian poet Jean Sénachttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Sénac) and contemporary Algeria will be shown as part of an exhibition we’re organising for the Cornerhouse (http://www.cornerhouse.org/) in 2011. No doubt he would have unable to resist taking some shots of John’s case had it made the journey south with me.

From Paris to AlgiersAfter returning to Paris and working there for a few days, it’s time to catch my flight to Algiers for the next stage of my journey. This being the beginning of summer – and so of a particularly busy period for many people shuttling back and forth between France and Algeria to visit family – I found myself temporarily accompanying some of these diasporic groups as they queued for the same flight as me. This proved an eye-opener. It seemed I was the sole passenger there not of Algerian origin, and many of the people queuing were families travelling together. This explained some of the very large cases that were stacked on the many, many trolleys jostling for position in the long line snaking ahead and behind me – but not all. It became clear that many were taking additional luggage for friends and family with them. One couple in front struggled to zip back up bags of brand new children’s clothes as they discussed how to make their hold baggage lighter. This proved to be a common plight, as it soon dawned on me that the major reason why there was such a delay was because the check-in staff were rigorously applying baggage limit rules – and nearly every party had significantly exceeded the limit. A rather diminutive woman travelling alone in front of me somehow managed to steer her towering trolley piled high with cases and bags to the desk only to be told that her luggage weighed 17 kilos over the limit. Despite ten minutes of pleading and negotiating she was still issued with a bill for several hundred euros as a penalty. She was far from the only one compelled to pay additional charges that morning. Air Algérie musn’t have any trouble breaking even in the summer months, I muttered to myself.

Standing in that queue for check-in for ninety minutes also made me realise that it wasn’t just clothes and chocolates that travellers were bringing with them. At one stage a well-dressed and polite man approached the family in front of me and after a brief conversation and some persuasion they eventually agreed to do him the favour he had clearly come especially to the airport for: to deliver medication bought in France to his relatives in Algeria. I lend him my pen and he scribbles down his family’s address on a scrap of paper and gratefully hands them two small white labelled boxes with a smile. I wonder how many times this must happen on flights between the two countries, and begin to daydream about the wide variety of objects and belongings that must continually be circulating between them across the Mediterranean. And if you have any doubts about the profound imbrications between the two countries as the fiftieth year of Algerian independence approaches, I invite you to take such a flight in summertime: the sight of so many children with families or being led around in groups with the mandatory neon ‘Unaccompanied Minor’ bibs around their necks will immediately dispel any uncertainties. How many children in France are of Algerian origin now, or have links to the former colony through their family? I don’t think I’d ever been on a flight with quite so many children onboard before: it was really quite a privilege to witness a small part of this phase of diasporic migration in action.

While I finally get to Algiers I’m too busy with work to keep a regular diary of my thoughts, so instead decide to let my camera do the talking. The case feels very distant from me now but still remains at the back of my mind. So I document my trip through photos rather than words, and will offer these to John on CD when we meet for the final interview again.

As I work with you on Left Luggage the pied-noir poet Jean Sénac is very much in my thoughts. In fact, I am sending you a photograph by my friend and photographer Réda Samy Zazoun that relates to Sénac's life.

I find the texture of this image very evocative and admire the fact that Réda Samy managed to combine within one image both a French colonial street sign (not terribly unusual, in fact, in contemporary Algiers) and a pre-1962 advertisement poster: the latter only revealed because of cleaning works that took place last year.

Apart from the meditation on time that the inclusion of the watch obviously encourages, the supposed connotations of 'élégance' and 'précision' with Europeanness - facilitated by the use of French - were, of course, not merely of incidental importance for the formation of Algerian identities, either pre-1962 or in the post-colonial era. The rediscovery of this advertisement poster thus provides a fragile and ephemeral trace of the past in post-colonial Algiers but also, more prosaically, epitomises the continuing influence French language and culture still has within Algiers today.

The sense of time and of being out of kilter with time - whether literally or metaphorically - is further nurtured by the strapline just discernable at the top. Asking simply: 'Êtes-vous à l'heure?' - 'Are you on time?' - it also plays on the French for one's watch being 'à l'heure': being 'right' or 'keeping time'.

Such a banal incitement for viewers to purchase this product becomes something rather different when you realise that this was the road where Sénac was murdered in 1973.

Indeed, the street sign uncannily raises the spectre of his life and death: as Réda Samy reminded me, Elisée Reclus was a geographer and anarchist, and in French the word 'reclus' can mean 'cloistered' or a 'recluse' - chillingly foretelling the fate of Sénac himself, who by his death lived alone in a tiny cellar on this small, hidden-away street, increasingly ostracised and in fear of his life.

It's tempting therefore to interpret the miraculous reappearance of this poster here as a return of the repressed - historically and culturally - and thus read the photograph as a strangely fitting epitaph to Sénac, whose place in the newly independent Algeria was finally deemed anachronistic by those who engineered his murder. Ultimately, it might also provide a timely warning to Algerian society: who belongs in post-colonial Algeria, who decides, and at what cost?

And so the case is about to depart on the next stage of its journey, via its owner. It’s my final week with the case, although its presence will linger in my mind long after its stint in Manchester is over. Rather than store it away in a room upstairs behind a closed door, the case has now remained by the front door in my hallway since June and given me much food for thought. I now realise why: during all this time in between my travels it has been the first thing I have seen every time I returned home. I’m actually going to miss it.

I’ve neglected to write any notes on the time I spent with it between arriving back from Algiers and now, when the case had to travel mentally with me as I went on family holidays to Italy and Ireland in August. Instead I offer John some photos from Donegal, mostly taken on the rare days when it didn’t rain.

John phones me to discuss where to meet up. I have been musing about this during the last week but hadn’t reached a definitive decision. But I do know that it has to be Manchester. Why? In the past I had escaped to spend periods in France, and I had also lived in London over two years, but my ties with the city are too strong to suggest anywhere else. I narrow down my choice of location to two places.

First, I suggest Piccadilly train station, where we eventually make the opening image of our collaboration. I have regularly commuted into the city by train since childhood and Piccadilly has constantly been my point of arrival and departure. I’ve always been attracted to places of daily transit and as the city’s main train station it is one of the key arteries linking Manchester to the rest of the UK. Like many of the major English train stations, it has changed considerably over the last two decades. Gone are the days of old leaking roofs and flocks of pigeons nesting in dark and filthy upper recesses: now a parade of gleaming shops and bars fill two floors and light floods in through large glass windows and fine mesh roofing high above the platforms. This can present a challenge to memory: can your recollections of your past in a place remain the same when so much of its fabric has changed? The station’s transformation seems to have effaced many of my recollections from childhood and adolescence passing through here but it will always be more than a mere stop on my daily commute between home and work.

The second location I propose is The Holy Name Church on Oxford Road. This is where my parents married in 1973, and where my favourite photograph of them was taken, but also because it reminds me of my father’s migration to the city. When he first arrived here, he used to live on Dover Street behind the Church, and the Holy Name was where he attended Mass. Further down the same side of Oxford Road, I was born in St Mary’s Hospital in 1978, and now work opposite the Holy Name at the University. So when I am on campus I pass by it at least twice a day, yet seldom catch people climbing or descending its steps: how many students and staff have ever ventured inside? Every time I see it, it also reminds me of my own return back to my alma mater after living in London and working in Wales and thus to an area that has played a pivotal role in my parents’ lives. This unplanned and oddly circular journey never fails to surprise me and despite myself seems to root me irrevocably here.

Before we meet, John’s last email also asks me to ponder an expression in French that I shared with him when we met to exchange the case. When discussing my current joint research project, I talk about our interest in how the population known as pieds-noirs (colonial settlers of European origin in French Algeria) have been represented since almost one million of them fled from North Africa at the end of the Algerian War in 1962. I mention that the choice for pieds-noirs at the time – or at least the choice that clearly many metropolitan French and pieds-noirs themselves felt they had – was summarised pithily as ‘la valise ou le cercueil’ (’the suitcase or the coffin’).

When you study the iconography of this particular historical moment, one of the key images is a June 1962 cover of the news weekly Paris-Match, showing a pied-noir couple and their young child onboard a ship looking back as they leave Algeria behind with the emotive headline: ‘La France nous aime-t-elle toujours?’ (’Does France still love us?’). I place a copy of this in the case for John to keep and it strikes me that I have managed to spend most of my time with the case and my reflections on it as an academic; using research and work as a convenient smoke screen. I now realise – or perhaps admit to myself – that this has enabled me to avoid discussing more personal details of my own life and family’s migration in greater detail. But is the division between academic research and one’s personal life ever neat or complete? A wise woman once said to me that, no matter how esoteric or abstract your research might seem, you are effectively writing your own autobiography through it. How could one’s research not be overdetermined by the life experiences your identities might bring you?

So I also place within the case a smooth dappled stone plucked from a beach in Donegal that must have rolled miles along the seabed. As a dual symbol of both land and the sea, it seems strangely appropriate. Perhaps it wasn't, after all, such a coincidence that I was drawn to an object from an in-between space.

Finally, I place within the case the Polaroids that had accompanied me on my travels and two postcards. Before departing the UK, I had noticed that John’s father’s Canadian passport was issued at Bône (now known as Annaba) in Algeria, and so whilst in Algiers I returned to visit a stamp and postcard seller whose stock of both is unsurpassed. I choose two colonial postcards of Bône for John, both of which in some ways seem to chime with the project. With that I close both the locks on the case: it’s time for it to return to its owner.

John noted in my journal entries over the summer that when I arrived in Algiers I put down my pen and switched to using my camera to continue the dialogue.

But this was not as straightforward as it might seem.

I had been warned before by several people that taking photographs in Algiers would not be easy - and is, in fact, to be discouraged. On my previous visit to the city a year earlier I had noted that the camera culture endemic to the UK's streets seemed nowhere to be found. I didn't think this was necessarily a question of limited means or access to photographic equipment: as any visitor to Algiers will immediately realise, mobile phones (many of which have cameras) are ubiquitous and there is no shortage of camera studios and film processing shops in the city centre. The invisibility of the street photographer seemed more down to local and cultural reasons rather than the socio-economic ones Western visitors may readily assume.

But, of course, not all street photographers in the city would be locals anyway: I might have expected to see a more visible presence of visitors there, but tourism clearly continues not to be a priority. This is not to say that Algiers is devoid of such influxes: many foreigners are residents, and the current numbers of Chinese migrants working on major construction projects across Algeria is testament to this. As I described earlier, summertime also heralds an increase in the circulation of diasporas between France and Algeria, and it was clear that many of the people thronging the city's streets in July were visiting family and friends during their summer holidays. Nevertheless, I very seldom saw someone actually using a camera - and on the very rare occasions when I have in the past, it has mostly been by the city's seafront, with families posing against the backdrop of the Mediterranean.

Discretion is therefore de rigueur, and from discussions I have had with local photographers, it's clear that surreptitiousness is crucial. Consequently, many of my photographs were taken in carefully chosen places: in famous sites outside the city and areas where I felt less conspicuous. But looking back at my images now, it's not a coincidence that few feature people: apart from the attendant ethical questions this would pose, I was also concerned by the more immediate consequences of being caught snapping by local police.

Indeed, my brief brush with the law during my stay was a case in point. Unable to sleep one morning as dawn broke, I decided to venture outside onto my fifth-floor hotel balcony in order to photograph the skyline and roofs opposite. Through blurry eyes, I dozily composed several images. My snapping abruptly stopped, however, when out of the corner of my left eye I discerned a policeman down below, hands firmly on his hips, silently staring up at me...

The automatic flash on my camera had given me away. Without wishing to acknowledge his presence - and keen to avoid the detailed conversation that would undoubtedly ensue - I quietly retired inside my room and gently closed the window behind me. I then waited for the knock on the door...

But none ever came. Now fully awake, and feeling suitably foolish, I returned to bed and tried to fall back to sleep. It would be easy to write off this incident as an illustration of the evident nervousness and suspicion that surrounds the use of photography within Algiers, but given recent events closer to home - that have notably inspired the British Journal of Photography's current `Not A Crime' campaign (http://www.not-a-crime.com/), alongside the `I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist' campaign (http://photographernotaterrorist.org/) - perhaps the plight of photographers in the UK is not so dissimilar...

Away from my travels, as a researcher in visual culture, over time I have become acutely conscious of how hazardous working with images can be and sometimes wondered if they shouldn't have a warning sign. It's often all too tempting to use images as mere `illustration' of a pre-existing argument, as if they were little more than an ingredient in a recipe. It seems far more preferable to let images `speak' for themselves... but if images could `talk', what would they say?

I have always been interested in how an image can denote very different things simply through the use of cropping and choice of scale, the location where it appears, and which text accompanies it. The seemingly ever-increasing circulation of images via online social networking and media sites serves as a reminder of how foolish it would be to assume that an image has any inherent meaning - or that there's only ever one and that this is immutable.

...a timely reminder of how a photograph's veneer of veracity may peel back to reveal nothing: the more you look, the less you see.

Nevertheless, to reflect upon this collaboration with John, it's been enlightening to observe which photographs he has chosen from those I offered him, how he processed them, and which of the many possible narratives have developed over the time of my participation. The selection of images and positioning of text alongside them has duly shaped our narrative and undoubtedly encouraged certain meanings. Perhaps, in light of this, we could reformulate Sontag's statement: whilst one may never understand anything from a photograph, with the auxiliary power of an accompanying text, can't they be made to say almost anything?

As our dialogue in Left Luggage thus begins to draw to a close, John sent me an e-mail asking me to think about:

`The role of photography in your trip and its relationship with your simultaneous roles of researcher, tourist, diary writer, suitcase carrier, North European, and linguist. I was also thinking of the relationship between the snapshots and the texts you have produced, as well as the ensuing dialogue between us traced in Left Luggage.'

I now become conscious of a link between the function of the suitcase in Left Luggage and of photography within it. Whilst the use of accompanying texts, blog entry titles, photograph captions and sequencing of photographs all work to anchor the uploaded images, is not the fate of these images, circulating virtually via the blog, also to travel?

Participants in Left Luggage may briefly borrow John's suitcase, but perhaps its viewers could be interpreted in turn as `borrowers' too: the image here, like the case in between uses, an empty vessel filled with whatever significance its user chooses. The image considered thus would become an item of left luggage too: deposited online but in suspended animation until accessed or, indeed, reclaimed.

Or should we, alternatively, see the viewers as passengers too, transported elsewhere by the images? Do images travel with you, carried within your mind? Could viewers themselves be `carriers'? Photography as infection?

But as I muse about the role of images here, another voice from the past returns with a timely warning never to take photography at face value. For, as Barthes claimed:

As I write these final words, it's been six weeks since the suitcase returned to its owner, but I now realise that a small trace of it has never left. When sifting through a pile of papers untouched since June, the suitcase unexpectedly makes a return: a final Polaroid I took of it upon its arrival at my home falls out from a book's pages.

So this memento of the suitcase will remain with me in its stead. But would it not be unkind not to let this, albeit virtually, also travel? I send a scan of it to John and can but wish it bon voyage.

A bitter-sweet commemoration of her mother's life, Lucieta remembers choosing the suitcase in which, a few years ago, she returned her mother's ashes to Venice and `la sua gente'.

Maria Teresa Dorigo, Trafalgar Square, 1949

Dear Lucy,

This photograph confirms that there is no such thing as coincidence. A mise en abyme if ever I saw one since, in the photograph I made of you, you are standing in front of the very wall that appears in the background of your mother's picture.

All best,

John

Photograph of Maria Teresa Dorigo (1949) (Verso), Inscribed by Her with the Handwriting and Uncertain Memory of Old Age

By inheriting the photographs of our parents, time plays its trick on us through a mortal reversal of roles. With the passing of years, we witness the transformation of our parents into our children and of us into their parents.

[Walker, y﻿our footstepsare the only way; there is no other.](John Perivolaris)

23 March 2014

I arrived in a rainy Birmingham, wrapped in sweaters and a duffle coat, carrying my grandfather's leather suitcase. An exotic place in which to find itself after its many travels through the tropics and most of the world's oceans.

Oakfield Road

Waiting for Dianne and her family at 93 Oakfield Road I noticed signs of previous passers-by.

Three Generations of the Regisford Family,
93 Oakfield Road, Birmingham, 14 March 2014

Dianne Regisford, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, 23 March 2014

Mrs Methlyn Regisford, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, 23 March 2014

From the Caribbean, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, 23 March 2014

Mr & Mrs Regisford, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, 23 March 2014

Postcard to Dianne Regisford, 14 April 2014

Postcard to Dianne Regisford (Verso), 14 April 2014

Correspondence of a Journey Received from Dianne Regisford, 18 April 2014

Correspondence Woven Across the Stitch of Old Trade Routes, Received from Dianne Regisford, 18 April 2014

The Unfolding of a Journey of Knots, Received from Dianne Regisford, 18 April 2014

Haiku Postcard Sent by John Perivolaris to Dianne Regisford, July 2014

Haiku Postcard (Verso) and Bird Skull Found on Talisker Bay, Skye, and Wrapped in African Cloth (Photograph by Dianne Regisford), July 2014

Dr James Kent is mentioned in the interview above. For a recent conversation with him, Click hereThe photographs by John Perivolaris of London's Docklands also mentioned in the interview are presented in the posts that follow and form part of this series of photographs

CSO: `I feel like the same person and I thought that I wouldn’t. Or, I thought that I would be a different person […] but I am not. I just have this other person with me. […] It feels very natural. I felt that the pregnancy was so weird. It was so alien and felt unreal. And then, the moment she was out, it was just very natural. It just makes sense that she’s around now.’

​CSO: `I’m afraid all the time, worrying that things might be wrong or that something will happen to me or, most of all, that something will happen to her, or that something will happen to my partner. I did not think so much about such things before.’

​CSO: `I’m now part of the motherhood clan. With all these people I knew before, suddenly the conversation is all about being a mother. People now talk to me on the bus. And, I’ve become this person who talks to pregnant women. We’ve got new friends who have babies. Obviously, so many women are mothers, but we mostly talk about it mother to mother. Going through birth, I understand how extremely strong women are. But they don’t really talk about that.’

CSO: `It was placed in the middle of our living room, where it has been ever since. It has been prominent as a piece of furniture, first of all. It’s just so beautiful. I’m a little sad to see it go. It’s become part of the inventory. For me. it was like an empty slate, like Vilja. Empty holders I had to fill. I’m filling Vija with milk. That’s taken over my life. Spatially, I have been feeding her everywhere. I’m feeding her right now, in this park. This has changed my relationship to space because I think in terms of that pub has hard benches to sit and breastfeed on, or where is the next place where I can sit down and give her a feed... When I got the suitcase, I thought that my space would be very confined, but actually I feel that my personal space has broadened out to the whole city. So, I wanted the suitcase also to be filled with the idea of giving life but also of expanding space, changing space by dint of being a mother. ..It took a long time to decide what to put in the suitcase. I thought of nappies. Then I thought of all the pink associated with having a girl. I also thought about the way girl babies are often dressed in slogans, like “Daddy’s Sweetheart”, turning them into little cuties. It’s never powerful slogans. I never liked that. I’ve written over several of those slogans. For International Women’s Day I dressed her up in one of them, but crossed out “Daddy’s Sweetheart” and wrote “My Own Little FIghter”. So, I had thought of filling the suitcase with pink stuff. In the end, however, I decided to be a little bit more conceptual than just filling the suitcase with clothes. It has passed that stage in its life where it just contains clothes.’

​Inside the suitcase we have breast pads. What you have to bring with you everywhere because your boobs go nuts with milk. On the pads I written the different places in which I have breastfed Vilma. It's kind of like a breastfeeding map of London.

JDP: `I notice the Norwegian embassy is represented.'

CSO: `The Norwegian Embassy was when we were getting Vilja a passport. I was breastfeeding in line.'

JDP: ` I also notice a lot of pubs here.'

CSO: `I now have a mental map of all the seats in these pubs, the tactile experience of sitting. For example, the Empress has really hard seats. They're impossible for breastfeeding. I think that was my worst experience. Windsor Castle is great because it has a couch with cushions that you can rest your arms on. My geography of London has changed according to where I am comfortable and where it's nice to take Vilja.

JDP: `You've brought a sense of the body to the suitcase, so that the latter becomes a metaphor for it. Even more interesting is the consequent transformation of this very masculine suitcase, originally belonging to a sea captain, a very dominant male figure. In a way, you have appropriated the suitcase. It becomes another type of body. This makes me associate your relationship to the suitcase with that of a previous collaborator in this project, Omar García. He filled the suitcase with broken eggshells.'

CSO: `Which is very feminine, actually, isn't it?'

JDP: `And also symbolic of birth, life, death: the life journey.'

CSO: `And the body. I've never felt more aware of my body. It's a machine for Vilja, as well. Now I've started working again I have to express milk for her to have. My body is working in all kinds of different ways.'

JDP: ` The types of spaces you visited present an interesting mix. You have everything, from political spaces, like the Norwegian embassy, cultural spaces as well, like Tate Modern.'

CSO: `London Metropolitan University was quite special because I was going there to do a workshop. Vilja was six weeks old and I told them I am bringing my baby. When I arrived I was stopped in the reception and was told it was not allowed to have children on campus, a decision enacted for the first time that day. All kinds of forms had to be filled to gain access.'

JDP: `The idea of thresholds, borders, embassies, airports, passports, is prominent in your contribution to this project. You have also tagged some of the breast pads with ferry and train journeys.'

CSO: `Talking to a lot of women who have recently become mothers, it seems that the domestic threshold of the house gains a new significance, the idea and practice of helping each other get out of the house, because it often takes more effort and organisation, and guts to take out your boobs everywhere. That's a big threshold for many mothers.'

​JDP: `Would you say you have repurposed a lot of the spaces you have recorded?’

CSO: ‘Breastfeeding in a broad variety of settings, especially academic or cultural ones, is a kind of statement; showing that you can still have your head on, that there are still many possibilities, that, in fact, motherhood does not have to be a border at all.’

With Brenda Burrell, Kendal, 29 October 2017

I met with Brenda Burrell in Kendal. She told me she hated having her photograph taken. Here is a photograph of her father's suitcase together my grandfather's. The suitcases were exchanged.

Brenda’s father started his working life as a coal miner and eventually became an army nurse. When he left the army, he continued his nursing career.

BB: `My father was very proud of his appearance. ​He did all his own laundry and “pressing”. Ironing was what women did. My father taught me how to iron shirts.’

By Kendal Castle, 29 October 2017

​BB: `He liked the idea of being a husband, the idea of “my wife” and “my wife’s a teacher”. When I got married, he used to say: “my married daughter who lives in Birmingham”. That “married” part was very important to him. He loved the idea of being king of the castle that you hear of in abusive relationships nowadays. He very much became king of the castle when he left the army’.